What can I tell you about the next version of SBS?

I’ve spent most of this week here at Microsoft at the MVP Summit. I’m bound by NDA not to reveal anything about what I’ve been told this week, so I won’t. I can neither confirm nor deny if they are working on a next version of SBS…

On a totally related topic however, Microsoft did today release the a consumer preview of Windows Server 8. You can read about it on the Windows Server 8 blog. Now let’s look historically at what Microsoft has done. Microsoft has for 15 years built SBS based on the core technologies of Windows Server. Therefore if there was to be a new version of SBS, you can bet that it would include the technologies of Windows Server 8 as a basis and that the SBS team would most likely repeat what they’ve done in the past and built some very SMB friendly features around it. Therefore what I plan to do is to seriously get involved in this new release of Windows Server 8 so that I’ll be up to speed on the core components and through that I’m hoping to get a glimpse on what might or might not be in the next version of SBS.

As I said at the beginning, I can neither confirm nor deny if they are working on a next version of SBS nor what might or might not be in it. However, you can rest assured that as soon as I can talk about a product that may or may not exist, you’ll hear about it here on this site.

Bob, good eye! But keep in mind that what you are testing is a BETA version of Windows Server 8. No guarantees that what you see in BETA or in a Beta EULA will be in the final release, or even if there will be a final release 🙂

I’ve been on several hardware and software development teams in the last 40 years and have worked on products through alpha and beta testing, only to see them canned before they make it to market.